So far, I have not found a way to re-order the categories in the category menu bar. It's possible in the sidebars, but I don't even care about having the categories there. I have too much other content there already.

Has anyone found a way to do this? It seems that WP keeps the categories in the order in which they were first created. I want them in order of importance and/or popularity, decided by me, not the system.

Wow! Ouch! I thought I'd have an easy answer for you; expecting that categories in their menu bar would be treated just the same as pages are in their's. On the Page Menu Bar you can set the sort to key on an arbritary "order no." that you set (and can later RE-set if needs be) for each page.

Apparently, with ordering the categories you're stuck with either order of creation, alphabetic by name or by the "number of posts." That last choice is "close" to your "importance and/or popularity", but you don't determine the ratings and they might fluctuate over time. Sort of disconcerting for your users to have navigation elements moving around periodically.

Right. I think it's weird that you can't treat the cats the same as pages in the menu bars. Various plugins let you re-order the lists in the sidebars, but they don't work for the menu bars.

I'm sure there must be a way!

You could install this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-category-order/

and to the bottom of Atahualpa's functions.php add, without causing blank lines or spaces

PHP Code:

<?php // add new order type "order" to wp_list_categories
function bfa_new_wp_list_categories($string) {
return wp_list_categories('order=order&title_li='); }     
add_filter('wp_list_categories', 'bfa_new_wp_list_categories');
?>

Wow, Flynn. I did exactly as you said, and my site was disabled. First I got a blank white screen while in admin, then when I clicked on my bookmark for the front page, I got just a bit of the top blue header, and nothing. Just the spinning rainbow. I couldn't even get back into admin to edit functions.php, so I did it via FTP. Whew.

I wish somebody would create a plugin that would do what I want.

Or can you build this into the next version of the theme? It should be possible to order the cat and page menu bars as desired.

Sorry for that, Paula. The plugin mentioned to add the "order" option to wp_list_categories even though I did not try it out.

I'd like to get my to-do list shorter before I add new things.